When you’re working through some vague performance issues (e.g., “SQL Server seems slow today”), one of the common things to do is to collect some performance counters. If you are collecting performance counters for the first time on the server, you don’t have anything to compare them against. This usually leads to searching the web for resources that will tell you what numbers the counters should be. And sadly, it quite often ends with either misleading advice or with a

I am honored to be selected to deliver 2 sessions at the SQL PASS Summit 2014. I will be delivering a half day session on administering BI systems and a regular session on techniques for indexing. If you were selected to speak this year, congratulations. I look forward to attending many of your sessions! If you like the “I’m Speaking” image I added to my blog, feel free to use it in your own blog or other materials. If you

I talked previously about network pipelines and how to get the most out of a fat network in the post Network Packet Size: to Fiddle With or Not to Fiddle With. If you need to move large amounts of data and have a network infrastructure that can support a larger then normal packet size, you can get tremendous performance boosts by increasing packet size. The big performance boosts can only be realized if every part of the path between server

I have one more thing I want to talk about regarding the conversation I had recently with my friends and former colleagues at Idera about the things that slow down SQL Server. Another “quick performance wins” you can take advantage of is segregating the types of files SQL Server uses. If you install SQL Server by just clicking NEXT until you get to the end, you end up with everything running on the same drive. Different files have different types

Join me for 2 days of fun and education at SQL Saturday #277 in Richmond, VA on March 21 and 22, 2014. I will be delivering an all-day pre-con session, Performance Tuning and Troubleshooting Like a Pro, on Friday, March 21. The session is only $99 if you sign up before February 20. On February 20th, the price goes up to $125. Title: Performance Tuning and Troubleshooting Like a Pro Level: All levels Description: Do you wish you could turbo

One of the projects I’ve been working on recently was to automate our production SQL Server installs including our standard configuration changes. Much of this process was already done by my predecessor Nic Cain (blog|@SirSQL) who had written an interactive PowerShell process for doing the SQL Server installs and making some of the configuration settings. I just needed to add some enhancements and new features to that. One thing I added to the script was to automate setting the power

A little more than a year ago while working at Idera, I was consulted on reports from a few clients using the Idera monitoring tool SQL diagnostic manager (SQLdm). SQLdm was reporting very high numbers for internal object allocations (internal_objects_alloc_page_count) and very low numbers for internal object deallocations (internal_objects_dealloc_page_count) to the point that SQLdm showed that individual sessions were reported using more space than was available in the database. I worked with Vicky Harp (blog|@vickyharp), SQLdm dev lead and an

A network pipeline isn’t nearly as pleasant to look at as the oil pipeline (or anything) in Alaska, but it’s something that DBAs should be aware of. There is a server configuration in SQL Server that controls the size of packet in which SQL Server sends out data. This setting is called network packet size (B). Yet another size we need to know about in SQL Server. As DBAs, we tend to think of size in terms of 8K pages

Welcome back for day 26 of my series 31 Days of Disaster Recovery. Today I want to share a tale of a mysterious backup that was running too long, and as the SAN admin reported, nothing had changed in terms of configuration of the SAN or our LUNs. We eventually tracked down the issue, and it was something none of of us had even considered. Likewise, it was something we never even thought to look for at the time we

My series 31 Days of Disaster recovery has been on hiatus due mostly to illness. I’ve been battling a chest cold that became bronchitis. I’m still fighting cough, but even that has improved to the point that I’m now sleeping longer at night than night. It wasn’t so much that I was too sick to write a blog post as it was that I was too sick to think up good ideas and put them into words. Rather than deliver